Who knew there was even such a thing. But who wouldn’t want to celebrate pasta? As it happens my Grandad was Italian and, although he died long before I was born, every Sunday (after mass) we would gather at my Granny’s house for lunch and she would come out of the kitchen with a huge bowl of steaming hot spaghetti Neapolitan. Those were happy days. Anyway, I digress.
To celebrate world pasta day, I thought I’d share a case study.
One of the things I like most about my job is the variety of work I do and the range of organisations I work with. Sometimes I help established agencies deliver a brief, usually because they are temporarily over-stretched or in need of a particular expertise. It’s always interesting. A while ago I helped a research agency with the technical aspects of a survey-based segmentation on… you’ve guessed it… pasta sauces!
To be honest, the client did all the hard work, and I did the fun stuff. They designed a good online survey which, for the uninitiated, is harder than you might think. They jumped through all the hoops required to get a good survey completed by good respondents, again, something that’s a lot harder than you might think. They processed all the data and passed it on to me and I got to do my favourite thing: building segmentations. I built two so the end client could choose the option that made most sense for them.
I won’t bore you with how I did it except to say I used an old-fashioned but reliable technique called factor analysis to identify groups of people who had similar attitudes to food and a pasta sauce all based on how they answered survey questions. There are always lots of different approaches and there’s a fair bit of fiddling around taking some questions out and putting more in until I have groupings that meet my friend Julie’s segmentation rules (I wrote another blog on that).
Julie’s rules for good segmentations are that they must be:
- Understandable (the differences between the groups must be obvious)
- Actionable (the results have the potential to drive a change)
- Sizeable (neither too big nor too small)
Once all this was done and the end client agrees on which option they want, I tidy up the data and send it back to my client who does the hard work of bringing each segment to life for their client.
Always nice to get some feedback from the client who said:
“Susie (as ever) delivered a great piece of work for us – in this case a validated shopper segmentation that has proven a great hit with our client. As well as coming up with the ‘goods’ for us (and on a personal note) – Susie is also a real pleasure to work with”
